In this video from the ARM Research Summit, industry thought leaders discuss the challenges, opportunities, and technical hurdles for the ARM architecture to thrive in the HPC market. “The panel will focus on Arm in HPC, Software & Hardware differentiation and direction for exascale and beyond, thoughts on accelerators, and more!”

Today Mellanox announced the availability of storage reference platforms based on its revolutionary BlueField System-on-Chip (SoC), combining a programmable multicore CPU, networking, storage, security, and virtualization acceleration engines into a single, highly integrated device. “BlueField is the most highly integrated NVMe over Fabrics solution,” said Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox. “By tightly integrating high-speed networking, programmable ARM cores, PCIe switching, cache, memory management, and smart offload technology all in one chip; the result is improved performance, power consumption, and affordability for flash storage arrays. BlueField is a key part of our Ethernet Storage Fabric solution, which is the most efficient way to network and share high-performance storage.”

Today Allinea software, now part of ARM, announced plans to preview the latest update to its powerful tool suite for developing and optimizing high performance and scientific applications at ISC17 in Frankfurt. “Eliminating performance loss across systems and minimizing the communication overhead often make a critical difference in improving application run times in HPC. We believe that our extended cross-platform support will enable users to achieve unprecedented results by running their systems more efficiently on each of the major platforms and even across platforms,” said Mark O’Connor, director of product management, server and HPC tools, ARM.

In this Radio Free HPC podcast, Rich gives us the lowdown on his recent tour of the SuperNAP datacenter in Las Vegas. Run by Switch, the campus has over up to 2.4 million sqft of Tier IV Gold data center space with 315 Megawatts of datacenter capacity.

The ExaComm 2017 Workshop at ISC High Performance has posted its Full Agenda. As the Third International Workshop on Communication Architectures for HPC, Big Data, Deep Learning and Clouds at Extreme Scale, the one day workshop takes place at the Frankfurt Marriott Hotel on Thursday, June 22. “The objectives of this workshop will be to share the experiences of the members of this community and to learn the opportunities and challenges in the design trends for exascale communication architectures.”

Pavel Shamis from ARM Research presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “With the emerging availability server platforms based on ARM CPU architecture, it is important to understand ARM integrates with RDMA hardware and software eco-system. In this talk, we will overview ARM architecture and system software stack. We will discuss how ARM CPU interacts with network devices and accelerators. In addition, we will share our experience in enabling RDMA software stack (OFED/MOFED Verbs) and one-sided communication libraries (Open UCX, OpenSHMEM/SHMEM) on ARM and share preliminary evaluation results.”

Over at the SUSE Blog, Jay Kruemcke writes that the High-Performance Computing Module (HPC Module) for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES) is now available for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) systems. The HPC Module is delivered as an add-on product to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. “In summary, the HPC module allows us to keep the content closer to what’s happening in the HPC community upstream, providing more leading-edge tools in a more manageable fashion, leveraging a different lifecycle than the base SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The new HPC module contains packages to optimize and manage HPC systems, and build HPC applications – building a bridge between the base server and an HPC stack (such as the stack provided by OpenHPC). This journey has started – some packages have already been made public and we have much more in the works and in our release queue.”

“2017 will see the introduction of many technologies that will help shape the future of HPC systems. Production-scale ARM supercomputers, advancements in memory and storage technology such as DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME), and much wider adoption of accelerator technologies and from Nvidia, Intel and FPGA manufacturers such as Xilinx and Altera, are all helping to define the supercomputers of tomorrow.”

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a set of IT and Science stories. Microsoft Azure is making a big move to GPUs and the OCP Platform as part of their Project Olympus. Meanwhile, Huawei is gaining market share in the server market and IBM is bringing storage to the atomic level.

“Back in 2013 I wrote the following blog expressing my opinion that I doubted we would reach Exascale before 2020. However, recently it was announced that the world’s first Exascale supercomputer prototype will be ready by the end of 2017 (recently pushed back to early 2018), created by the Chinese. I did some digging and wanted to share my thoughts on the news.”

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Industry Perspectives

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China’s massive upgrade of the Tianhe-2A supercomputer to 95 Petaflops peak performance. "As detailed in a new 21-page report by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, the upgrade should nearly double the performance of the system, which is currently ranked at #2 on TOP500." [Read More...]